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Lost Arc

Dec. 1, 2008
This low elevation image shows the G ring arc discovered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. This faint arc of material is maintained by a gravitational interaction with the moon Mimas.

This low elevation image shows the G ring arc recently discovered by Cassini. This faint arc of material is maintained by a gravitational interaction with the moon Mimas.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 20, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.185 million kilometers (736,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 23 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

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